The Keys to Successful Direct Mail Marketing

Summary
What you’ll learn in this guide
Case study key findings
We’ll show you how to use surveys to determine which of
your marketing mailers will win before you go to print.
•• We compared four direct mail pieces against each
other and found:
Our guide includes:
•• Tips for getting key performance metrics.
•• Best practices on writing marketing offer testing surveys.
•• A real-world example of how our direct mail offer
testing framework can be applied to your brand.
oo The target market for these mailers can be
segmented into two distinct groups: early adopters
and those who wait to purchase new products.
oo The differences in attitude and behavior between early
adopters and later-stage adopters are significant.
oo The data suggest that later-stage adopters may
need an incentive to act and a reminder that a
deadline looms.
oo Wells Fargo®’s offer with a clear deadline and “It’s
time to switch” messaging scored higher overall.
Created by and for the use of SurveyMonkey Audience for marketing purposes only. This
study was not commissioned by American Express®, Citi®, Discover®, Wells Fargo®, Visa®,
MasterCard®, or any other companies mentioned in the study.
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Methodology
What?
How?
When?
SurveyMonkey Audience fielded
a Direct Mail Offer Test study
on four direct mail pieces to
demonstrate how to successfully
test marketing offers.
The survey was fielded using
SurveyMonkey Audience.
Respondents represented the
general U.S. population. A total
sample size of 441 was surveyed.
We fielded the survey from
5/11/15–5/12/15.
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5 benefits of testing offers with surveys
Test various offers
quickly and easily
Filter out the
ineffective offers
Refine your
good ideas
Test with
diverse audiences
Save money
A survey allows you to
present a wide range
of offers to your target
market and get qualitative
feedback fast.
Investigate which offers
work and which fall flat
by asking your target
market directly.
If you test a bunch of
offers through a survey,
you can quickly see which
ones are rising to the top.
Use surveys, rather
than focus groups, for
a scalable way to get
responses from different
segments in your
target market.
Traditional testing
methods like focus
groups cost a lot of time
and money. Surveys are
a faster, easier way to
choose a winning offer.
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How to determine marketing offer success
The quickest way to determine a winning offer is to use a standard scoring model.
This is an example scorecard that incorporates several key success metrics depending on the type of offer you’re testing and how you
define a successful offer.
Top 2 Box: The percentage of respondents who answered the two most positive answer options
A
B
Attributes Tested
Define your key
success metrics.
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Purchase Intent
Statistical Significance
Appeal
Statistical Significance
Uniqueness
Set the number of
metrics depending
on the offer you’re
testing and how
you define success.
2
Statistical Significance
Relevance
Statistical Significance
Average Score
%
%
%
%
(A)
%
%
%
Use the top 2 answer
choices for each
question to more easily
compare how each
offer performed.
%
%
%
*Statistical Significance at 95% confidence interval
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Created by SurveyMonkey Audience
Determine which offers performed better by using stat testing, a calculation that
shows if two numbers or scores have a significant, or big enough, difference. This
shows if one offer truly resonates with consumers more than the others. An (A)
in the (B) column here signifies that Concept B is both statistically significant and
scored higher than Concept A.
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Compare the average
scores of each offer to
determine which one
performed best based
on the success metrics
you chose.
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Key success metrics
Here are several key metrics you can incorporate into an offer test:
Willingness to Open
Appeal
Uniqueness
Whether your offer
motivates respondents to
open the envelope
The overall appeal of
your offer is a strong
indicator of Willingness
to Open
How different one offer
is from the others
Perception of Quality
Message Clarity
Believability
If your offer is perceived
to represent a high quality
brand/product
How clearly your offer
messaging is understood
by respondents
How trustworthy your
offer is perceived to be
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Marketing offer test summary
Background
Goal
We used SurveyMonkey Audience to
test the effectiveness of four direct
mail offerings. The direct mail pieces
appear on the following page.
Put four current direct mail
pieces head to head to see
which one performs better.
Key insights
•• We found that Wells Fargo’s offer with a clear deadline and “It’s time to switch”
messaging scored higher overall.
•• When we segmented the market into two distinct groups to see which offer
resonated best with the target market, we found that later-stage adopters may
need more of an incentive to act and a reminder that a deadline looms.
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Identifying what resonates with the target market
Visa is the brand name that appears on Wells Fargo cards. We wanted to see if there were any differences of opinions in the
Wells Fargo offer for Visa and MasterCard cardholders. The differences for current Visa cardholders were significant:
Among the attributes tested, they found Wells Fargo’s offers
less convincing, valuable, and memorable.
40%
39%
36%
34%
35%
31%
Getting MasterCard holders to act and switch over to Visa
could be the key to Wells Fargo’s success as they found the
offers more convincing, valuable, and memorable.
36%
32%
30%
25%
20%
15%
10%
10%
0%
Convincing
Visa
Valuable
Memorable
MasterCard
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Segmenting responses reveals additional data
Taking a further look, we segmented the market into two
distinct groups: early adopters and those who wait to purchase
new products.
“I usually try
new products
before other
people do.”
Identifying what resonates with the target market allows for more
targeted advertising and higher likeability and purchase intent.
Strongly agree/
Agree
Early adopters
Strongly disagree/
Disagree
Later-stage adopters
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Identifying what resonates with the target market
The differences in offer likeability for later-stage adopters (Wells Fargo’s likely target market because of their “It’s time
to switch” messaging) were significant:
Later-stage adopters liked the offers more than (38% Early
vs 63% Later) their early stage counterparts:
Taking into account that all four offers included some sort of
$0 annual fee or 0% APR, later-stage adopters may need an
incentive to act and a reminder that a deadline looms.
80%
70%
63%
60%
50%
40%
38%
Early
Later
30%
20%
10%
0%
Offer likeability
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Going beyond your first test
Offer testing goes beyond asking respondents to rank and rate offers against one another.
Take it a step further:
•• Ask respondents open-ended
questions to get the "Why?" behind
their answers.
•• Track your performance over time
by setting up recurring surveys.
Need some help
selecting metrics? We’ve
got you covered.
The possibilities are endless:
•• SurveyMonkey provides you with a
list of all the available key metrics
you can test.
•• Our concept testing framework spans a
variety of categories—all you have to do
is provide us the materials to test, and
we can make that concept assessment
happen. Contact us.
•• Package testing, logo testing, name
testing, claims testing...the list goes on.
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